http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/12/21/091221taco_talk_packerThorbjørn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in presenting the Peace Prize to Barack Obama last week, quoted the previous African-American recipient, Martin Luther King, Jr., and added, “Mr. President, we are happy to see that through your presence here so much of Dr. King’s dream has come true.” Obama nodded and pursed his lips in the kind of grimace that passes over his face when he’s moved. Perhaps he was thinking of a key passage in the speech that he was about to give—lines that opened up a certain distance from the nonviolent doctrine of King and Mahatma Gandhi. “As a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone,” Obama said, when it was his turn at the lectern. “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.”
There was no way for the President to avoid mentioning the apparent contradiction between his decision to send thirty thousand more troops to Afghanistan, which he announced two weeks ago at West Point, and his receiving the Peace Prize. But, instead of disposing of it in a perfunctory gesture, he made it the basis of his address, devoting the first half of the speech to what he called the challenge of “reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths—that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.” Working out apparent contradictions, reconciling irreconcilables, finding balances, living with paradox—these are the intellectual bread and butter of Obama’s politics. “We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice,” Obama concluded. “We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.” He is the negative-capability President.
In Oslo in 1964, King used soaring oratory that pitted love and violence as opposites in a cosmic struggle. Forty-five years later, Obama employed the language of a complex and tempered hope. He identified less with the utopianism of King than with the moral realism of John F. Kennedy. He spoke of the “difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace,” adding, “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution.” After discussing the difficulty of balancing exhortation and diplomacy in the promotion of human rights, he admitted, “There is no simple formula here.” But this philosophical modesty isn’t only the difference between a politician and a prophet; Obama has been changed by the Presidency. Compare the Nobel speech to the one he gave in Berlin’s Tiergarten in July, 2008, in which he envisioned a renewal of the transatlantic partnership, and summoned his two hundred thousand ecstatic listeners to tear down all remaining walls between peoples. Last week, Obama did not tell Europeans what they wanted to hear, and the response of the invited audience at Oslo City Hall, whose décor seemed to have been inspired by that of a progressive pre-school, was distinctly muted.
Between these two speeches, the President spent months deciding whether and why to send young Americans to kill and die in Afghanistan. He seems to have emerged from the intense self-education of this policy review, which included visits to Walter Reed hospital and Arlington National Cemetery, with a new resolve about his power as Commander-in-Chief. In Oslo, Obama was in effect calling the bluff of absolutists on both the right and the left. The evangelical idealism and blunt militarism of President George W. Bush did more to taint than to advance the cause of human rights. Both at West Point and in Oslo, Obama’s realistic appraisal of a worldwide landscape of bad options served as an implicit rebuke to the simplifications of his predecessor. And yet American weapons and bloodshed, not the dream of world peace, he said, have “helped underwrite global security for more than six decades.” There are no good options, but that doesn’t relieve Americans of the responsibility to choose, and at times, if necessary, to choose the path of “human folly.”
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